Dosage Instructions For One A Day Vitamin Gummies: Take Two A Day

One A Day is a well-known brand of vitamins, but its name is just that. A name. A brand. Not dosage instructions. This caught Jeff by surprise, though, when he bought a bottle of the brand’s Vita-Crave gummy vitamins for adults. He opened the bottle to find it half full: pretty normal for bottles of pills and supplements, but still irksome. Then he noticed the instructions on the bottle: take two per day. Take two One A Day gummies. I see.

He sent along this helpful visual aid:

Not only is the bottle half empty, you need to take TWO vitamins daily. Each bottle only contains 50, so there’s not even a month’s supply! What a scam!

I wouldn’t call it a scam, but it is a little misleading. Maybe the idea is that forgetting to take a few gummies is built into the system. Of course, I’ve been working on the same bottle of 100 multivitamins since 2010, so I would think that.

Nice logic. Half the quantity. Double the size of the gummy. Still get twice the volume according to you. There might be slightly more volume because of the lowered efficiency of space with bigger gummies, but no way would it be double the volume of the current arrangement.

Gotcha, don’t ya wish we had an edit button? I doubt people would be happy with your solution though since the price of the full bottle with 50 doses would then be double the price the half full bottles are now. Way too many people don’t think about the price per unit, but rather the overall price.

I did that trick in high school. From a purely mathmatical perspective, doubling the size of the gummy but putting half as many in will keep the volume exactly the same. This of course doesn’t doesn’t factor in things like interconnecting shapes or compression from the fact it’s a gummy.

There’s 25 days worth of vitamins in that bottle and they didn’t say there was 30-day supply. I guess, like a good consumer, Bill will start reading the labels on future purchases.

I don’t really understand why Bill wants to buy vitamins that mimic candy and personally, I think it’s idiotic for adults to do this. I also think it’s terrible to market this kind of vitamins-as-candy for children.

Then again, I don’t see the point of vitamin supplements except for specific medical needs.

Some adults have major issues taking pills. My girlfriend’s dad, for example, has to chew even the smallest pills before he can swallow them. Gummy vitamins would definitely help for somebody like this who needs them.

^^This.
I get my vitamins from FOOD. In a per milligram comparison, I would bet $10.00 worth of fresh fruits and vegetables would contain more milligrams of vitamins than $10.00 worth of these gummies.

Sometimes food just isn’t enough. I would have to eat far more meat than I want to in order to boost my iron. I eat a lot of iron-rich foods, but even that isn’t enough because I can’t eat a plate of meat every day. Vegetables can only go so far in helping.

If you’re lucky/frugal $10 might buy you 2 or 3 days worth of your RDA of some of the vitamins and minerals. Instead of 3+weeks with the gummies (which give you more of a much broader range of vitamins).

If you’re lucky/frugal $10 might buy you 2 or 3 days worth of your RDA of some of the vitamins and minerals. Instead of 3+weeks with the gummies (which give you more of a much broader range of vitamins).

Science. Recent research and studies that show that:
1.) most (note that’s “most”, not all) US adults get more than enough vitamins / minerals from their diets
2.) for some types of vitamins, excess gets excreted, not stored
3.) for the “mutivitamin” pills, most of the time they’re not digested completely, and the remainder is passed through the system
4.) unless you have some medical deficiency, you’re probably not getting any benefit from taking vitamin supplements.

I take these because similar pills are huge and hard to swallow, which makes me want to skip days. Since I found these I hardly ever miss days and I don’t hate taking them. If it -works- how is it idiotic?

Vitamins are a medical need. Unless you are very careful with your diet you are almost certainly missing at least a few of the vitamins in these things. Taking a multivitamin regularly is a simple guarantee that your body has everything it might need without doing all the math on everything you eat.

Gummy vitamins are great (yes, even for adults, you grumps)– they’re convenient (no need for water to choke down a horse pill), generally better tasting than dry chewables, and when you have a medical condition that makes it hard for you to swallow pills, they’re perfect.

BUT I too have noticed this: each brand is all over the map on how many you should take to constitute a complete daily allotment of vitamins– some say two a day, some say *four* (two in the morning, two in the evening). I haven’t yet found a gummy that is just one piece a day (contrary to the One a Day brand name).

Plus, it’s not that the bottles are half full– it’s that these gummies settle and shrink as they dry out. You never get a “full” bottle, just the way it is.

Sadly, I’ve found that stores charge a heck of a lot more for gummy vitamins compared to regular pills.

Is there actually a medical condition that causes people to have trouble taking pills? I can understand that some people probably have a gag reflex that doesn’t like the feeling of the pill going down but I wouldn’t consider that to be a “medical condition”. When I was little I couldn’t take pills for that reason, eventually I had to take some tiny little pills for some a severe poison ivy rash and those got me used to the feeling enough that I could take a bigger pill with no problem.

I’m sure the reason why gummy vitamins are so much more expensive is because the process is more complicated to create them. With regular pills it is just a powder pressed together and maybe coated in something. Gummy vitamins have to be cooked and probably deposited into corn starch molds, then there is a bit of curing time before they can be packaged up.

Yes, there are medical conditions that cause people to have trouble taking pills. And even if there aren’t, if it’s easier for somebody to eat a gummy, what’s the problem with spending extra on the gummies?

One medical condition I know my Great Uncle suffered. He had a bone spur pushing into his esophagus. It was years before the doctors found it. He couldn’t swallow anything bigger than watered down yogurt, and even then he had to gulp. Gummie vitamins and dry chewables were the only way he could take anything. Otherwise, they would get stuck and he’d start to choke.

Aside from the esophageal/nervous system problems already raised, here’s a common example: weight loss surgery that reduces the size of the stomach. Renders all manner of pills of certain sizes/timed release ineffective because they leave the surgically-smaller stomach before they can be digested. Gummies (and liquid medications) solve that problem.

One A Day has always been expensive. Gummie vits are so digestible. I love them. Regular vits tend to leave a bad taste in my mouth all day. Our whole family has taken them for years. Why? Because on those horrible days when we’re living on yogurt, granola, cereal or anything else I don’t have to cook, it just makes me feel better. I buy Vitafusion, 150 gummies for about $10.

I read the labels and compared the values of a different gummie brand at Sam’s Club with a regular chewable for my 10 year old. Then compared the price and quantity. The gummies were a little more expensive, but I thought I’d be nice and get them. It never occurred to me to look and see what the dosage size was on the gummies. At 10 years old, it said the dosage was 2 a day. So now the gummies were more than twice as expensive. I was pissed.

They might be 2-a day since people don’t necessarily take the full dose at once. Personally my stomach doesn’t react well to the massive quantities of iron, so I cut the chewable in half and take one in the morning and one in the evening (or just take one after realizing I also get vitamins from food). Cutting pills or chewables is pretty easy, cutting gummies would be a PIA.

And this is honestly a non-story. “One a Day” is a brand name, of course you need to look at how many DOSES are in the container (not just pills), and they almost always sell drugs in units of 25, 50 ,100 etc and not by month.

They could be a little more straightforward with this (label the # of doses on the front would be a good start), and the giant half-full bottle is a bit misleading. But Bayer isn’t doing anything wrong.

“One A Day” could be stating that it’s the only *type* of vitamin you need to take each day, not necessarily the quantity of that vitamin. Perhaps a bit misleading, but that’s why yoiu should read the direction/nutrition labels before buying.

Regarding the gummies for adults, the standard kind give me stomach pains and also taste/smell terrible. And I buy whatever the store-brand is where I’m shopping since they’re generally $3-4 cheaper than name brands.

You can try cutting the pills in half and take the two halves at different times. I had the same issue (ingesting large amounts of iron at once causes problems for some people). My stomach is much happier with me taking them in 2 smaller doses. I generally use the store brand chewables.

As far as “one a day” being misleading, it’s a brand name. Should I be upset that everlast batteries don’t last forever, or that I CAN believe it’s not butter?

On the other hand, if only one of your products had an internal battery that was toxic, and was properly label as such. No, that’s not misleading. (nevermind that “one a day” could be taken to mean “one [time] a day”).

I don’t really see the issue with the bottle being half full. If the bottle said 50 gummies inside and it had 50 gummies inside then what’s the problem? Would you feel better if they just made the package smaller?

Instructing that you take two a day is misleading though. I suppose that the name “One a Day” is kind of like the brand name “As Seen On TV”

The fast-food industry is rife with such scandal. The McDonald’s sold their hamburger joint to Ray Kroc decades ago, and Wendy’s was actually founded by Wendy’s father. Also, Col. Sanders and the Little Caesar both have honorary titles, Domino’s was started by an Irishman, and you can’t order spinach at Popeye’s.

Actually, it’s an American thing. American’s take two pills, so the doses in the pills are set out as such. Many other countries only take one pill and the active ingredient doses are set that way.

Since “American’s take two pills” (possibly some potency psychology at work?) putting a single “dose” into a single pill would result in many people taking larger doses then they should.

For those of us who read the bottles and would take the proper dose anyway, no need to complain you’re safe either way. If these were Euro gummy vitamins they would just come 25 to a pack for about the same price (all else being equal). That aside, I don’t think most people are informed consumers and mistakes would be made. Most who read this site are, but not most people in general.